5/1/2000
Property owners, volunteers devote time to forgotten cemeteries
By Jennifer Thomas
Palatka Daily News
EAST PALATKA - A group of volunteers and some property owners spent Saturday erecting
monuments that were moved from the historic Braddock Cemetery in South Putnam
County to one in East Palatka off McCormick Road.
Mary E. Murphy-Hoffmann, 47, said the monuments were discovered when the
Braddock Cemetery, located off of Denver road south of Crescent City, was
undergoing clean up and restoration in 1997.
The headstones are for eight members of the Mays family, and were originally in
a second historic cemetery, located between Orange Mills and Buena Vista near
the St. Johns River.
Murphy-Hoffmann, a librarian at Putnam Correctional Institution, believes the
headstones were wrongfully transported in the 1970s from the Mays Cemetery when
the property was sold and subdivided, but is unable to prove it.
She said the stones were removed, but believes the remains of the bodies are
still located in the cemetery. Traces of the burial site have been removed with
the exception of some fragments of stone monuments, she said.
Murphy-Hoffmann and her husband Lynn Hoffmann, a 56-year-old computer
consultant and software instructor, own St. John the Evangelist Cemetery,
established in East Palatka in 1881. They agreed to temporarily set up the
monuments in their cemetery.
"This is interim. At least here, they can be put up and displayed in a
respectful manner," she said.
Murphy-Hoffmann hopes the stones will one day be restored to the Mays Cemetery,
which was established in 1832, and is located nine miles from where they are
being stored.
The couple received assistance from the Florida Confederation for the
Preservation of Historic Sites, which donated equipment, materials and time to
the East Palatka project.
"They're primarily interested in the Civil War and anything to do with the
Civil War," Murphy-Hoffmann said, referring to the Confederation, based in
Daytona Beach. "They were involved with the Braddock Cemetery.
One of the questions was what to do with the Mays stones."
Murphy-Hoffmann's family heritage is connected to both the Mays and St. John
the Evangelist cemeteries. Her great-grandmother's first husband, Eugene
McCallum, and a stillborn child, were buried in the Mays site.
Murphy-Hoffmann's great-grandmother, a native of Ireland, Ellen Fitzpatrick
McCallum Hazel, later remarried. Her second husband, John Bland Hazel, is
Murphy-Hoffmann's great-grandfather. Both bodies were later moved near the
couple's home, Edgefield-on-the St. Johns, and eventually St. John the
Evangelist.
Murphy-Hoffmann said the Mays Cemetery had been established by Dr. R.G. Mays ,
A.S. Simpkins and Archibald Cole, who relocated to the area from South Carolina
in the 1830s.
According to information provided by Murphy-Hoffmann, the owners originally had
orange groves until the freeze of 1835 killed the crop, and they began mills
for which Orange Mills is named.
Mays and his wife survived three daughters, who were buried in the Orange Mills
cemetery. The Mays relocated to Georgia and were buried there. Headstones that
were erected last weekend included: the Mays' daughters, Annie L. Lamar Mays
Cole, Feb. 18, 1827-March 7, 1871, and her husband, Archibald Hamblin Cole,
1879, child, Archie Woolridge Cole, who was one year and eight months old,
Elizabeth Nancy Mays Simkins, April 1, 1829-Sept. 30, 1862, and Sarah Stark
Mays Call, Dec. 10,1833-Oct. 10, 1858.
Three other people who were buried at the Mays site are Lydia Naugain Cowgill,
May 29, 1825-Nov. 17, 1871, Lucy Lee Call, Feb. 13,1856-Jan. 12, 1859 and Sarah
Mays Call, July 6, 1854-Feb. 16, 1871.
Hazel, a Civil War veteran, was a member of the St. John the Evangelist mission
church, situated across McCormick Road from where the cemetery of the same
namesake is currently located.
Members had attempted to bury one deceased parishioner on church grounds, but
found that the water table was too high. Murphy-Hoffmann said her
great-grandfather suggested establishing a cemetery across the street where an
orange grove had been planted to help with upkeep of the church.
"There's five acres here for the cemetery. There are a great many unmarked
graves here," she said, pointing out depressions in the landscape.
Murphy-Hoffmann and her husband spent four years negotiating with the St.
Augustine Catholic Diocese, which owned the property, before they received a
quit-claim deed for one and a quarter acres in the cemetery.
She said a backer, who had originally agreed to relocate the church building
across the road to the cemetery, but was lost during the period of the
negotiations. The church, also established in 1881, is in disrepair.
The librarian plans to have a ceremony once the East Palatka cemetery project
is finished, and will have a sign made and erected, which reads: "The Mays
Cemetery Memorial, Est. 1832, stolen 1974."
"We're doing the best we can to right a grievous wrong,"
Murphy-Hoffmann said.
Volunteers who assisted with the work are Confederation secretary and board of
directors member Bill Blair of DeLand, second vice president and board member
Richard Jones of Ormond Beach, board member Dinah Jones of Ormond Beach and
board member Gerald Leblanc of Sun City Center, Fla.
Adam Mengel, the City of Palatka's director of planning, and William Krueger,
Putnam County operator/assistant emergency coordinator with the Amateur Radio
Emergency Service, also volunteered to assist with the cemetery's clean up as
part of Keep Putnam Beautiful.
Murphy-Hoffmann said she has maintained the cemetery with the assistance of
family members at times. Her husband's mother, Marian Eileen Stewart Hoffmann
Horcher was buried there April 1, 1999. Murphy-Hoffmann requested that the
stone monument that is on her great-grandfather's grave because he was a
military veteran. Hazel died in 1909.